Point of Origin

by Patricia Cornwell

  “And you would be right,” I said.

  “Look.”

  He played with the unlit cigarette.

  “Maybe I’ve reached a point in life where it’s do it or lose it,” he said. “The hell with what people think. I ain’t going to live more than once, and shit, who knows how much longer I’m gonna be hanging around, anyway.”

  “Marino, you’re getting entirely too morbid.”

  “It’s called reality.”

  “And the reality is, if you die, you’ll come to me and end up on one of my tables. That ought to give you plenty of incentive to hang around for a long time.”

  He got quiet, staring out his window as I followed Route 6 through Goochland County, where woods were thick and I sometimes did not see another car for miles. The morning was clear but on its way to being humid and warm, and I passed unassuming homes with tin roofs and gracious porches, and bird baths in the yards. Green apples bent gnarled branches to the ground, and sunflowers hung their heavy heads as if praying.

  “Truth is, Doc,” Marino spoke again. “It’s like a premonition, or something. I keep seeing my time running short. I think about my life, and I’ve pretty much done it all. If I didn’t do nothing else, I still would have done enough, you know? So in my mind I see this wall ahead and there’s nothing behind it for me. My road ends. I’m out of here. It’s just a matter of how and when. So I’m sort of doing whatever the hell I want. May as well, right?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, and the image of his garish house at Christmas brought tears to my eyes. I was glad I was wearing sunglasses.

  “Don’t make it a self-fulfilled prophecy, Marino,” I quietly said. “People think about something too much and get so stressed out they make it happen.”

  “Like Sparkes,” he said.

  “I really don’t see what this has to do with Sparkes.”

  “Maybe he thought about something too much and made it happen. Like you’re a black man with a lot of people who hate your guts, and you worry so much about the assholes taking what you got, you end up burning it down yourself. Killing your horses and white girlfriend in the process. Ending up with nothing. Hell, insurance money won’t replace what he lost. No way. Truth is, Sparkes is screwed any way you slice it. Either he’s lost everything he loved in life, or he’s gonna die in prison.”

  “If we were talking about arson alone, I’d be more inclined to suspect he was the torch,” I said. “But we’re also talking about a young woman who was murdered. And we’re talking about all his horses being killed. That’s where the picture gets distorted for me.”

  “Sounds like O.J. again, you ask me. Rich, powerful black guy. His white former girlfriend gets her throat slashed. Don’t the parallels bother you just a little bit? Listen, I gotta smoke. I’ll blow it out the window.”

  “If Kenneth Sparkes murdered his former girlfriend, then why didn’t he do it in some place where nobody might associate it with him?” I pointed out. “Why destroy everything you own in the process and cause all the signs to point back at you?”

  “I don’t know, Doc. Maybe things got out of control and went to shit. Maybe he never planned to whack her and torch his joint.”

  “There’s nothing about this fire that strikes me as impetuous,” I said. “I think someone knew exactly what he was doing.”

  “Either that or he got lucky.”

  The narrow road was dappled with sunlight and shade, and birds on telephone lines reminded me of music. When I drew upon the North Pole restaurant, with its polar bear sign, I was reminded of lunches after court in Goochland, of detectives and forensic scientists who since had retired. Those old homicide cases were vague because by now there were so many murders in my mind, and the thought of them and colleagues I missed made me sad for an instant. Red Feather Point was at the end of a long gravel road that led to an impressive farm overlooking the James River. Dust bloomed behind my car as I wound through white fences surrounding smooth green pastures scattered with leftover hay.

  The three-story white frame house had the imperfect slanted look of a building not of this century, and silos cloaked in creeper vines were also left over from long ago. Several horses wandered a distant field, and the red dirt riding ring was empty when we parked. Marino and I walked inside a big green barn and followed the noise of steel ringing from the blows of a hammer. Fine horses stretched their splendid necks out of their stalls, and I could not resist stroking the velvet noses of fox hunters, thoroughbreds, and Arabians. I paused to say sweet things to a foal and his mother as both stared at me with huge brown eyes. Marino kept his distance, waving at flies.

  “Looking at them is one thing,” he commented. “But being bit by one once was enough for me.”

  The tack and feed rooms were quiet, and rakes and coils of hoses hung from wooden walls. Blankets were draped over the backs of doors, and I encountered no one but a woman in riding clothes and helmet who was carrying an English saddle.

  “Good morning,” I said as the distant hammering grew silent. “I’m looking for the farrier. I’m Dr. Scarpetta,” I added. “I called earlier.”

  “He’s that way.”

  She pointed, without slowing down.

  “And while you’re at it, Black Lace doesn’t seem to be feeling so hot,” she added, and I realized she thought I was a veterinarian.

  Marino and I turned a corner to find Dorr on a stool, with a large white mare’s right front hoof clamped firmly between his knees. He was bald, with massive shoulders and arms, and wore a leather farrier’s apron that looked like baggy chaps. He was sweating profusely and covered with dirt as he yanked nails out of an aluminum shoe.

  “Howdy,” he said to us as the horse laid her ears back.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Dorr. I’m Dr. Scarpetta and this is Captain Pete Marino,” I said. “Your wife told me I might find you here.”

  He glanced up at us.

  “Folks just call me Hughey, ’cause that’s my name. You a vet?”

  “No, no, I’m a medical examiner. Captain Marino and I are involved with the Warrenton case.”

  His eyes darkened as he tossed the old shoe to one side. He snatched a curved knife out of a pocket in his apron and began trimming the frog until marbled white hoof showed underneath. An embedded rock kicked out a spark.

  “Whoever did that ought to be shot,” he said, grabbing nippers from another pocket and trimming the hoof wall all the way around.

  “We’re doing everything we can to find out what happened,” Marino let him know.

  “My part in it is to identify the woman who died in the fire,” I explained, “and get a better idea of exactly what happened to her.”

  “For starters,” Marino said, “why that lady was in his house.”

  “I heard about that. Strange,” Dorr answered.

  Now he was using a rasp as the mare irritably drew her lips back.

  “Don’t know why anybody should have been in his house,” he said.

  “As I understand it, you had just been on his farm several days earlier?” Marino went on, scribbling in a notepad.

  “The fire was Saturday night,” Dorr said.

  He began cleaning the bottom of the hoof with a wire brush.

  “I was there the better part of Thursday. Everything was just business as usual. I shoed eight of his horses and took care of one that had white line disease, where bacteria gets inside the hoof wall. Painted it with formaldehyde—something I guess you know all about,” he said to me.

  He lowered the right leg and picked up the left, and the mare jerked a little and swished her tail. Dorr tapped her nose.

  “That’s to give her something to think about,” he explained to us. “She’s having a bad day. They’re nothing more than little children, will test you any way they can. And you think they love you, and all they want is food.”

  The mare rolled her eyes and showed her teeth as the farrier yanked out more nails, working with amazing speed that never slowed as he talked.


  “Were you ever there when Sparkes had a young woman visiting?” I asked. “She was tall and very beautiful with long blond hair.”

  “Nope. Usually when I showed up, we spent our time with the horses. He’d help out any way he could, was absolutely nuts about them.”

  He picked up the hoof knife again.

  “All these stories about how much he ran around,” Dorr went on. “I never saw it. He’s always seemed like a kind of lonely guy, which surprised me at first because of who he is.”

  “How long have you worked for him?” Marino asked, shifting his position in a way that signaled he was taking charge.

  “Going on six years,” Dorr said, grabbing the rasp. “A couple times a month.”

  “When you saw him that Thursday, did he mention anything to you about going out of the country?”

  “Oh sure. That’s why I came when I did. He was leaving the next day for London, and since his ranch hand had quit, Sparkes had no one else to be there when I came around.”

  “It appears that the victim was driving an old blue Mercedes. Did you ever see a car like that on his ranch?”

  Dorr pushed himself back on his low wooden stool, scooting the shoeing box with him. He picked up a hind leg.

  “I don’t remember ever seeing a car like that.”

  He tossed aside another horseshoe.

  “But nope. Can’t say I remember the one you just described. Now whoa.”

  He steadied the horse by placing his hand on her rump.

  “She’s got bad feet,” he let us know.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Molly Brown.”

  “You don’t sound as if you’re from around here,” I said.

  “Born and raised in South Florida.”

  “So was I. Miami,” I said.

  “Now that’s so far south it’s South America.”

  12

  A BEAGLE HAD trotted in and was snuffling around the hay-strewn floor, going after hoof shavings. Molly Brown daintily perched her other hind leg on the hoof stand as if about to be treated to a manicure in a salon.

  “Hughey,” I said, “there are circumstances about this fire that raise many, many questions. There’s a body, yet no one was supposed to have been inside Sparkes’s house. The woman who died is my responsibility, and I want to do absolutely everything I can to find out why she was there and why she didn’t get out when the fire started. You may have been the last person to visit the farm before the fire, and I’m asking you to search your memory and see if there’s anything—absolutely anything—that might have struck you as unusual that day.”

  “Right,” Marino said. “For example, did it appear that Sparkes might have been having a private, personal conversation on the phone? You get any idea that he might have been expecting company? You ever heard him mention the name Claire Rawley?”

  Dorr got up and patted the mare on her rump again, while my instincts kept me far out of the reach of her powerful hind legs. The beagle bayed at me as if suddenly I were a complete stranger.

  “Come here, little fella.”

  I bent down and held out my hand.

  “Dr. Scarpetta, I can tell you trust Molly Brown, and she can tell. As for you”—he nodded at Marino—“you’re scared of ’em, and they can sense that. Just letting you know.”

  Dorr walked off, and we followed him. Marino clung to the wall as he walked behind a horse that was at least fourteen hands high. The farrier went around a corner to where his truck was parked. It was a red pickup, customized with a forge in back that burned propane gas. He turned a knob and a blue flame popped up.

  “Since her feet aren’t so great, I have to draw clips on shoes to make them fit. Kind of like orthotics for humans,” he commented, gripping an aluminum shoe in tongs and holding it in the fire.

  “I give it a count of fifty unless the forge’s warmed up,” he went on as I smelled heating metal. “Otherwise I go to thirty. There’s no color change in aluminum, so I just warm it a bit to make it malleable.”

  He carried the shoe to the anvil and punched holes. He fashioned clips and hammered them flat. To take off sharp edges he used a grinder, which sounded like a loud Stryker saw. Dorr seemed to be using his trade to stall us, to buy himself time to ponder or perhaps work his way around what we wanted to know. I had no doubt that he was fiercely loyal to Kenneth Sparkes.

  “At the very least,” I said to him, “this lady’s family has a right to know. I need to notify them about her death, and I can’t do that until I am certain who she is. And they’re going to ask me what happened to her. I need to know that.”

  But he had nothing to say, and we followed him back to Molly Brown. She had defecated and stepped in it, and he irritably swept manure away with a worn-out broom while the beagle wandered around.

  “You know, the horse’s biggest defense is flight,” Dorr finally spoke again as he secured a front leg between his knees. “All he wants is to get away, no matter how much you think he loves you.”

  He drove nails through the shoe, bending points down as they went through the outside wall of the hoof.

  “People aren’t all that different, if you corner them,” he added.

  “I hope I’m not making you feel cornered,” I said as I kneaded the beagle behind his ears.

  Dorr bent the sharp ends of the nails over with a clincher and rasped them smooth, once again taking his time to answer me.

  “Whoa,” he said to Molly Brown, and the smell of metal and manure was heavy in the air. “Point is,” he went on as he tapped the rounding hammer, “you two walking in here and thinking I’ll trust you just like that is no different than your thinking you could shoe this horse.”

  “I don’t blame you for feeling like that,” I said.

  “No way I could shoe that horse,” Marino said. “No way I’d want to, either.”

  “They can pick you up by the teeth and throw you. They paw, cow kick, slap their tail in your eyes. It better’d be plain as day who’s in charge, or you’re in for a world of trouble.”

  Dorr straightened up, rubbing his lower back. He returned to his forge to fire another shoe.

  “Look, Hughey,” Marino said as we followed. “I’m asking you to help because I think you want to. You cared about those horses. You gotta care that someone’s dead.”

  The farrier dug in a compartment on the side of his truck. He pulled out a new shoe and grabbed it with tongs.

  “All I can do is give you my private theory.”

  He held the shoe in the forge’s flame.

  “I’m all ears,” Marino said.

  “I think it was a professional hit and that the woman was part of it but for some reason didn’t get out.”

  “So you’re saying she was an arsonist.”

  “Maybe one of them. But she got the short end of the stick.”

  “What makes you think that?” I asked.

  Dorr clamped the warm shoe into a foot vice.

  “You know, Mr. Sparkes’s lifestyle pisses off a lot of people, especially your Nazi types,” he answered.

  “I’m still not clear why you think the woman had anything to do with it,” Marino said.

  Dorr paused to stretch his back. He rotated his head and his neck cracked.

  “Maybe whoever did it didn’t know he was leaving town. They needed a girl to get him to open his door—maybe even a girl he had a past with.”

  Marino and I let him talk.

  “He’s not the kind of guy to turn someone he knew away from his door. In fact, in my opinion he’s always been too laid back and nice for his own damn good.”

  The grinding and hammering punctuated the farrier’s anger, and the shoe seemed to hiss a soft warning as Dorr dipped it in a bucket of water. He said nothing to us as he returned to Molly Brown, seating himself on the stool again. He began trying on the new shoe, rasping away an edge and pulling out the hammer. The mare was fidgety, but mostly she seemed bored.

  “I may as well tell
you another thing that in my mind fits with my theory,” he said as he worked. “While I was on his farm that Thursday, this same damn helicopter kept flying overhead. It’s not like they do crop dusting around there, so Mr. Sparkes and I couldn’t figure if it was lost or having a problem and looking for a place to land. It buzzed around for maybe fifteen minutes and then took off to the north.”

  “What color was it?” I asked as I recalled the one that had circled the fire scene when I was there.

  “White. Looked like a white dragonfly.”

  “Like a little piston-engine chopper?” Marino asked.

  “I don’t know much about whirlybirds, but yup, it was small. A two-seater, my guess is, with no number painted on it. Kind of makes you wonder, now, doesn’t it? Like maybe somebody doing a little surveillance from the air?”

  The beagle’s eyes were half shut and his head was on my shoe.

  “And you’ve never seen that helicopter around his farm before?” Marino asked, and I could tell he remembered the white helicopter, too, but didn’t want to seem especially interested.

  “No sir. Warrenton’s not a fan of helicopters. They spook the horses.”

  “There’s an air park, flying circus, a bunch of private air strips in the area,” Marino added.

  Dorr got up again.

  “I’ve put two and two together for you the best I can,” he said.

  He grabbed a bandanna out of a back pocket and mopped his face.

  “I’ve told you all I know. Damn. I’m sore all over.”

  “One last thing,” Marino said. “Sparkes is an important, busy man. He must’ve used helicopters now and then. To get to the airport, for example, since his farm was sort of out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Sure, they’ve landed on his farm,” Dorr said.

  He gave Marino a lingering look that was filled with suspicion.

  “Anything like the white one you saw?” Marino then asked.

  “I already told you I’ve never seen it before.”

  Dorr stared at us while Molly Brown jerked against her halter and bared long stained teeth.

  “And I’ll tell you another thing,” Dorr said. “If you’re out to railroad Mr. Sparkes, don’t bother poking your nose around me again.”